I Marie Kondo’d my entire internet presence, one account at a time

polygon.com:

After a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, my momentum and ambition were shrinking. I was writing Amazon product lists to pay the bills, freelancing when I could, and searching for jobs. My desire for structure manifested in a fervor for making lists: shopping lists, movie watch lists from IMDB’s top 100, games of the year to play. I did it endlessly, vapidly. I put digital library holds on e-books I never read, and idly filled my digital shopping carts with items I never actually bought. I spent hours on Target and Best Buy and Bookshop’s websites, almost making purchases.

I followed through with absolutely none of those plans. Instead, I felt a vague sense of emptiness while staring at my bank account, and a hollowing dread at the sight of my growing list of entertainment — which had begun to feel more like a list of tasks. I was collating as a way of giving myself a sense of purpose. But the make-work wasn’t satisfying, and worse, it had left me with a grotesque email inbox, full of steaming piles of advertisements.

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In the summer of 2021, I hit a ridiculous break point. My inboxes were indecipherable. I had gotten tired of the everything-is-a-subscription model, and the way that choosing a digital receipt when I bought a Scrub Daddy and a pack of gum at Target meant getting ads twice a week. I was upset at myself for signing up for Mercari in a moment of weakness — secondhand Ganni at that price? — before never perusing the site again. I was exhausted by the constant specter of consuming my attention over something I was supposed to buy, or log into, or care about.

That was when I had my first outlandishly antagonistic reaction to an “updated terms” email from a vendor I couldn’t recognize. I took the extra